Spherical aberration occurs in optical pickups during reading from and/or writing to optical recording media, when the thickness of the cover-layer of the recording medium is not optimal for the objective lens of the optical pickup. In general objective lenses are only well corrected for a single cover-layer thickness. However, variations of the thickness of the cover-layer occur due to the manufacturing process of the recording medium, and, which is more important, in multi-layer optical recording media systems.
Currently proposed methods for correcting the spherical aberration are telescopes or liquid crystal elements. For correctly setting these elements a control signal has to be provided by the optical pickup, which gives information about the current amount of spherical aberration. For generating such a control signal the amount of spherical aberration has to be detected.
US patent application US 2002/0057359 discloses an aberration detection device which detects spherical aberration by separating a light beam appropriately such as to enlarge a difference in the positions of minimum spot diameter of the separated light beams. The light beams are separated by a hologram having two regions divided by a boundary corresponding to an extreme value of a curve representing a wave front when the light beam has a minimum beam diameter. The separated beams are focused onto two detection devices. One detection device is located closer to the hologram than the focus position of a first-order diffracted light of the hologram, while the second detection device is located farther from the hologram. By measuring the spot size of the separated beams the spherical aberration is detected.
U S 2002/0176332 discloses an aberration detection device for an optical disk player. A returning light beam emitted by a light source and reflected by an optical disk is separated by a half mirror, and partitioned and deflected at a hologram into a light beam passing a first region and a light beam passing a second region. The light beam passing the first region is received by a plurality of photo-detectors, and the aberration is detected by comparing the resulting signals.